An Insider's Take on Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)

Malcolm: [00:00:00] And I was like, oh, brain computer interface. That's the next big thing. And I really invested my early career in brain computer interface.

Malcolm: It's what I did my thesis on in college. It's what my first job was. It's, you know, I, I did a lot of stuff in the space.

Malcolm: people think you'll have this like super fast communication system that communicates with your brain as easily as your brain can think.

Malcolm: And that is just not what you're going to get.

Malcolm: They are imagining like a computer feeding them facts in a way where they are aware that the computer is feeding them facts and they are asking for those facts.

Malcolm: That is not what's happening. A computer is overriding your consciousness because your brain can't tell the difference between what's coming from the computer and what's coming from, you know, that's what's actually happening. And you're not getting that much benefit from it when compared with just checking the internet or something.

Simone: Hello, Malcolm.

Malcolm: Hello, Simone. I am excited for this topic because it involves my old job and my actual specialization. [00:01:00] So when I was younger and I was trying to chart out what would be the big technology of the future that I should try to get on top of before everyone else. You know, I saw it like, okay, imagine I saw computers coming down the pipeline and I want to become a computer scientist before anyone's into computers.

Malcolm: That was how I saw the way I planned for my career, which seems like a very Malcolm thing to do. And I was like, oh, brain computer interface. That's the next big thing. And I made a big mistake by overinvesting my early career in this, but I really invested my early career in brain computer interface.

Malcolm: It's what I did my thesis on in college. It's what my first job was. It's, you know, I, I did a lot of stuff in the space. I actually, I worked as , the R& D marketing lead of the first commercially successful brain computer interface company, which was called NeuroSky which created these little headsets.

Malcolm: So Nekamimi was one of our big projects, which was like a little headset and it would control like cat ears on your head. And then another, like a lot of people used it for various things that like went. Memetically viral. And essentially what it was, was a really, [00:02:00] really simplistic EEG system that was using capacitive sensors.

Malcolm: So EEG stands for an electrocephalograph. It was really simple. The things it was reading in your brain just think of it like, it's, it's, it's an ear listening to the room of a party trying to catch the general vibe of what's going on. Is this a fun party or a funeral? Is this a, you know, but you can't really determine much more than that.

Malcolm: And the other thing is, is that whenever the sensor moved around, and so this is a big problem with any of these sensors that are like actually wearable. It would make a ton of noise. So the electricity, like the static electricity that's generated by like your hair moving or like a sensor moving just a little bit is so much louder than anything generated by your brain.

Malcolm: But even louder than that, but just. If you, the, the electricity generated by muscle. So if I like blink my eyes, that's like an explosion going off. So this is

Simone: an [00:03:00] incredibly noisy system. Like it's basically, you're saying it's picking up not just the sound of the party, but also a bunch of instruction outside and a football game that's playing in the background and all the commercials.

Malcolm: What I'm saying is it's imprecise. It's actually doing what it says it's doing. But it is wildly imprecise, but another thing to note here is it's functioning in a way that your brain is not really meant to function. So when you're communicating with an EEG using your brain you are communicating with that EEG in a way that's I mean, that's just not the way your brain evolved to communicate with things, right?

Malcolm: You're, you're, you're causing tons of neurons to fire at once in a way they weren't really meant to fire at once. And we don't know the effects of this really, not long term. And, and that's a potential problem because, you know, fire together, wire together. I, okay, what I'm talking about. So the way that your brain forms connections is when neurons Fire at around the same time or in around the same region of the brain, they begin to wire together.

Malcolm: That's how [00:04:00] like I do. That's the fundamentals of how the brain works. It's way more complicated than that, but that's a broad scope of it. Okay. For reasons that like you're using your prefrontal cortex, which is like not at all meant for external communication and firing it all at the same time. I don't know.

Malcolm: I would, I don't want to say anything on record, but I'd say it's probably not the best, but this actually becomes really interesting when you're then talking about The existing brain computer interface systems, because a lot of people, they look at brain computer interface technology and they think, oh, this is going to be like really, really, really transformative in the way that we engage with technology and it might not be and a lot of the systems we're using now might not be the systems that end up becoming popular.

Malcolm: They might be like those you know, I dunno, people from our generations, we had VR in our generations, but it was like ridiculous, [00:05:00] big machines that you would go to it like Epcot or like it's special centers. And they don't function at all the way our existing VR works. Or we had, you know, three day movies, but you would wear like colored glasses.

Malcolm: It was functioning in an entirely different way than the current movies. Right. So I'll get into more. What I mean was this, when I talk about the current. Field of brain computer interface. So first, let's talk about why the field stalled. So I was wrong. I made a bad gamble at the beginning of my career.

Malcolm: It didn't take off. And that's why I left the field. And instead of doing a PhD, got a business degree instead and went into a boring

Malcolm: I mean, I've always stayed interested in neuroscience, but I realized pretty quickly that it was a bad bet for the rest of my career because the field was moving slowly. Why was the field moving slowly? Is moving slowly due to astrocytic scar formation. So, an individual's immune system does not go into our brains because of the blood brain barrier.

Malcolm: A lot of people know that, right? They're like, oh yes, the blood brain barrier protects the brain from bacteria and viruses. [00:06:00] This is why if you get like a bacteria or virus in your brain, it's really bad. That doesn't mean your brain doesn't have cells to deal with that. They're just modified neurons called glial cells.

Malcolm: And Galil cells can have all sorts of support functions in your brain, but one is something very similar to white blood cells, where they like surround intruders or build scar tissue or something like that. It's, it's very interesting. Like our brains basically evolved like all of the support cells that the rest of the body has, but they're modified neurons.

Malcolm: It's, it's like independently evolved them. Very interesting. Anyway, back to Galil cells. Astrocytic scar formation is a type of scar f